Lasting treasures

Sermon preached on Sunday, August 4 at the Church of the Ascension, Munich
Readings for Pentecost 11: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23, Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21

Having had to prepare this brief sermon at very short notice – over breakfast this morning – I am grateful to the lectionary composers for their choice of readings. There really is one common theme that runs through all three readings:

·         What are our priorities?

·         Possessions, wealth, knowledge and power?

·         Or God’s values and priorities such as love right relationship with one another and with God?

Ecclesiastes is one of the books that nearly didn’t make it into the Hebrew Bible. Too pessimistic, too much ambiguity and not enough God! One reason it did make it in was that it was attributed to King Solomon, based for example on one of the verses we heard today: “I the teacher when king over Israel in Jerusalem.”

But it’s a good thing it did make it into the canon. For one thing our language would be poorer without it; we would miss phrases such as ‘vanity of vanities” or “everything under the sun.” But also because of the realistic attitude of its author. He describes life with all its frustrations and ambiguities and also reminds us that those things we sometimes think are most important such as wisdom, power, careers, wealth often only seem make us worried or anxious. We lose sleep over them although they are vanity or perhaps better translated as transient, fleeting, worthless, and temporary or literally like breath or vapour: certainly not something we should be building our lives on!

Jesus has a similar message. His parable could even be a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, and why not. He knew his way around scripture!

While Ecclesiastes complains that “one must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it” Jesus says “the things you have prepared, whose they will be?”

Now of course we need possessions, food, and drink. We need them to survive, we do good with them, and we perhaps even support our children with them. Jesus is warning us against excess, against possessions becoming the end rather than the means, against greed. Jesus warns us against false priorities, against worshipping these material things as false gods.

They will not make us happy and they will only remove us and distance us from the one real God and from God’s love.

Again: this does not mean that this world is not important or that we can just ignore what goes on “down here” and instead wait for some better life in the hereafter. The earth is as much God’s world as is heaven. What it means however is that we are called to live by God’s values in this world, in fact we are called to help bring them into effect.

Paul’s metaphor in Colossians is that we have already died through our baptism. Our new life in Christ has already begun in the here and now. In our new selves we must learn to abandon the greed and anxiety of this world, fleeting and vain as they are, and instead strive to live as followers of Christ in right relationship with God and one another and by God’s values and priorities.

These are the real and lasting treasures, ones worth us storing up because they will always be ours. No one will take them away.

Amen